Life of Skins
by Fan Fan Girl
Summary: One-shot. If you haven't done so already cruise down to the Celestial Veinroots in BKO and ride that lift Lolo made you down past Valara. THEN JUST TRY AND TELL ME THOSE AREN'T WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE. Pretentious experimental drivel, hints of Corellia/Kalas.


Life of Skins

Hers is an existence not unlike a question mark which hangs heavy pregnant pausing like overripe fruit—yes, she thinks, overripe and plump with juices and tight but cracking neatly around the edges, a shell of skin, a cocoon, and now and again swaying in the breeze against that screen of blue with its rainbow fetters, she dangling between them with the sun like tears in her eyes, but she doesn't blink.

She can't blink, or doesn't think she can, not since that first crack, slim clean slicing that had appeared when she'd finished growing, had become a queen at last, even though she regrets that first body which seemed more to her like a nest or a hole or a shell or a husk that she—that she, a human!—had wormed into, an intruder in a synthetic womb, still knowing that she was destined to perish and decay as all living things must perish and decay since the universe tends toward chaos (ruining, wrecking, colliding)—except somehow in that bolstered shell that housed warmly darkly secretly, a person: _her_, she was safe.

But then, that very same shell bolstered tight and hard began to split and she was terrified that she was dying, or dead, because her body was a traitor, a desiccated peel, swiping off of her like a shroud of spiderwebs, and she had to emerge re-choking on the again-raw air; she was no longer master of that lofty whitish gladdening castle, but a maggot here among the veinroots convulsing under a midnight blue spangling sky, sloughing off skin, clawing away glossily and tempting the breeze to prickle at her pink new child rubber pliant skin, so that it would stiffen in the harsh loving air. She has died so many times now that when the time comes she fears she will be unable to really die, because her real self—the original shell—sleeps glistening beneath that tree.

To be herself and eternally departing—a velvety skin that is more than silk or water, now a strip of young bark toughening, uncomfortably tight in time and making her gasp touching with fear sick rumors the miniscule crack that has split open her neck—to be this creature born from an eggwombseed by a bugwomantreedustmanribgod or nothing, and know that she, that is to say the form her fleeting shell takes, is really a neutral dead husk, and that inside is a yet-living husk (encasing another (encasing another (encasing another (encasing another (encasing another husk) husk) husk) husk) husk) which always seems to be de-collapsing in an outwardly way.

And so, she stares with glazed eyes at the world, unblinking, as much a forgone conclusion of natural selection as is higher thought in those micro-citizens who swim in tepid waters whipping their gelatinous arms to get on, to forge onward prismatically... that is to say, not forgone at all, but instead quite unnatural as a person born from magnus is unnatural; and now she makes a sharp halting start.

She recalls that fated youth who so long ago dragged his feet into this lush happy castle concurrently hoping demanding that she would stop the Emperor and knowing believing that she wouldn't, because he is like her (a question) and surely he too must wonder, plagued by the why's and how's...? Pushing aside the veil billowing in the window of her mind she approaches a memory of him as she saw him first, the anti-hero, the twin-soul still perfumed with the sweet ghost spices of another world, boy who did not even know that he had become a man, who easily rakishly insolently bore the fate of the world on his shoulders and yet whose heart would fail him before the end. He is a puzzle to her, wooden box with a brass lock glinting on its clasp forever closed to her, while she unpursuing hangs back and cannot but lament her lack of a key. Blue scathing rogue, how he troubled her, and for one who sees in the cyclic dawning and dimming of ages the lullaby of memories radiating from his aura could not escape her, she regarding the omens there as chilling curiosities, reading them as a mother reads dark fables by firelight horrified and yet knowing that she must teach them to her children, to resurrect the dusty histories and bloodstained morals, for only they, at the last, can save them. She, in her own way, interpreted the shadows that fell from his eyes, his mouth, parsing his demons from the heavy pungent crippling stains discolored and ambiguous that held cancerously to his soul—(_the world was fire, gods' anguish surging from a deep forbidden canyon in the earth tearing all asunder and_)—and she had collapsed, not so much from the hellish eye-cracking vividness of it all, but that very same mother's horror a thousand times magnified, knowing that she was powerless, that she could only try to warn them, that innocence would not would _not_ last.

Especially in him: from the start his darkness his light his power had all been evident to her—it was only centuries later when she had learned that the Ice Queen, last of her line, had been the one other woman to see him as he truly was, but that girl had vanished behind a tomb of ice long ago, abandoning him to a bright vacuous world that he wandered many times over unseeking even as he stumbled into her navy chambers again two hundred years later, bewildered, dazed with the look of one still half-dreaming but without rest. He, unchanged from the bitter defenseless youth of a now-past age, skin ripe still, body limber, outraged in his confusion to find her, too, still young lovely and regal standing there. He asks her how, and she replies, magic—

Then without much preamble, in a half-rushed, concentrated kind of way as though airing out secrets long pressurized by solitude, he unloads on her his past, his origin, those old terrible experiments in underground labs and the flawed child born from them; he tells of the other boy, the un-flawed one, who in dying gave him life which he had come to realize would be eternal. Unsurprised she stands away from him feigning neutrality and banality and decides to let a breeze slide by before commenting unhelpfully that theirs is a mysterious world and that what will be will be; while a part of her even all these years later craves a connection, some sort of human mutual recognition in the form of a you, too? however trite that may sound, but then she has forgotten how to be warm with people, or indeed never knew, and instead blindly considers the puzzle, estranged by a limit of selves and skin, pining now for the loss of identity that comes from a hive or a colony or sleep.

But that is neither here nor there, it should not matter to her that he didn't ask for immortality, that she knows he resents his loneliness, that he resents his resenting of the last gift from his brother—knowing with the sad cold certainty of one who has long watched others' lives never commenting never interfering because she has never lived her own.

Instead she lets him go, and months later beneath the tree's broad arching roots she is shrugging off her body like a shroud of white frost, stiff with age, rustling as it crumples down next to the rest of her bodies, and she is shuddering with her eyes open still; she inhales the dark night air drawing consciously a part of the sky into her, tasting the moonbeams as they flutter on their way down into the pit of her stomach to dance there secretly in some kind of nervous sickened worried dance. A handful of celestial seeds lie latently alive like marbles clicking through her fingers and she cradles them, her flesh paling over the rawness; and she continues to regret her self, this being she is, inhuman, something that hovers between the worlds overripe and creaking in the wind... but for this inexplicable desire to live, she would without a further thought drop plummet disappear into that place of nothingness where the Emperor is.

She clutches the precious seeds in her hands ever tighter, reminded again that these too could have been a tool for that man and his dream. The closest thing she had ever had to a friend, and she chose her life and happiness over his—the days that sail by confirm this irrevocably and history unravels in a blur. Corellia is not proud of the fact, but she is not distressed either, and as the tree above her lacks partiality, she too strives to stay neutral, to balance herself over that spiritual moral emotional line that divides reality, and just hungrily _be_, to lose herself in the wooden role of the Fairy Guide of Anuenue...

She must not wonder why she clings to the skin, yes clings to the hollow shells tumbling around her ankles, why she chooses the rainbow fetters and the domed prison of blue sky, why she cloisters herself in that timeless radiant castle frothing with blossoms and sunlight—what matters is that she sing with the Celestial Tree, as a former shell of her once said, and dance when its flowers bloom, while she watches the empty beautiful world hurtle onward through endless seasons of death and renewal.


End file.
